All posts tagged music

Music services that allow streaming or subscription plans are on the rise, though the old-fashioned ways of buying music — yes, that includes digital downloads — are still the big chunk of the market.

Subscription-type plans like Beats Music and Spotify saw global revenue rise 51% to $1.1 billion in 2013, while revenue from ad-supporting music streams like Vevo and Google’s YouTube was up nearly 18% to $500 million, according to data from IFPI and compiled by Statista. The data reflecting a growing trend of renting access to music rather than buying physical copies. Read More »

The music download war had become the music streaming war, with Pandora, Spotify, Apple and others vying to become personalized Internet radio stations for everybody. Among various age groups, younger people — including teens and young adults — are the biggest streamers, according to a survey by Edison Research and compiled by Statista.

While Apple has made inroads with iTunes Radio, which comes installed along with later versions of its mobile operating systems, Pandora is still on tops among all age groups, no doubt in part because it is available on Android, too. Read More »

Michael Dell’s private investment firm, MSD Capital, is taking a 9.9% stake in Kobalt, a 13-year-old company that says its advanced technology makes collecting royalties more efficient and lucrative for the songwriters the company represents. MSD paid about $25 million for the stake, according to people familiar with the matter. MSD declined to comment on the price.

Mr. Dell, the founder and chief executive of computer maker Dell Inc., wasn’t primarily responsible for his investment firm’s decision to take a stake in Kobalt, Instead, according to an MSD director, Michael Caro, the managers of his family’s $13 billion thinks Kobalt is a high-growth company that’s well-positioned in the market. The 15-year-old entity invests in a broad range of sectors, a spokesman said. Read More »

In a move that brings Spotify’s music recommendation technology completely in-house and allows it to more aggressively compete against Pandora, Beats Music, iHeartRadio, Rdio and other services, the Stockholm-based music streaming giant has acquired Echo Nest.

The deal is the culmination of a more than three-year relationship between Somerville, Massachusetts-based Echo Nest and Spotify, which is considered an IPO candidate.

Echo Nest technology blends machine learning and natural language processing–the respective expertise of co-founders and MIT doctorates Tristan Jehanand Brian Whitman–to build a database of songs and artists. The recommendation engine recognizes pitches, tempos and other similarities between songs and blends that data with a cultural understanding of songs and artists gleaned from blogs, music reviews and other online sources. Read More »

But here’s another lesson some have learned from the rise of streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora, which give listeners access to an ocean of music beyond the standard radio far: variety is overrated. What many people crave is repetition of the familiar.

Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever.

The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a familiar song, and tune out when they hear music they don’t recognize.

Stations have literally doubled down on the biggest hits. For example, remember how much you heard R. Kelly’s “Ignition” on the radio in 2003? It’s the freakin weekend baby. Well, it got just under 361,000 radio plays. In 2013, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” racked up just under 750,000, twice as much.

If you’ve been out of pocket for a few days, you may have missed the whole GoldieBlox-Beastie Boys flap. Head inside the post for a recap. The latest: Today, GoldieBlox replaced the music in Rube Goldberg-inspired video and said in an open letter that it wanted to avoid a legal fight. Read More »

By Simon Zekaria
The British Broadcasting Corp. is set to add a commercial download platform and a personalized digital music service amid a revamp of its online digital platforms.

The U.K.’s national broadcaster Tuesday said U.K. users will be able to buy a selection of BBC programs as downloads through a commercial, online platform called BBC Store. The BBC gave no details on the subscription model and cost.

It is also launching a music service called Playlister “in the coming days” that will allow users to tag and save lists of tracks they have heard on music and television shows. These can then be exported and played in full on digital music platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and Deezer, through smartphones, tablets and Internet-connected televisions. Users will also get hand-picked recommendations from DJs and hosts.

The BBC also plans changes to its popular online catch-up and live streaming service for video and audio, iPlayer. Dubbed “next generation” by the BBC and launching in the first half of 2014, the revamped iPlayer will have a standard 30-day catch-up window for content, compared with seven days currently, subject to approval by the corporation’s governing body. Read More »

On Tuesday YouTube announced its first awards show, set for Nov. 3 in New York. Lady Gaga, Eminem and Arcade Fire are the headline acts.

The Google-owned site has all but morphed into the Millennials’ MTV. Of the top 30 videos by user views all-time, the only one that isn’t a music video is “Charlie bit my finger.” If anything, it’s strange that it has taken YouTube this long to jump on the awards show bandwagon. Read More »

While such a big sale by a company still struggling to break even could raise eyebrows — particularly when a major shareholder is joining the selling — these are good times for consumer-facing internet companies. Facebook and LinkedIn are on the up, the Twitter IPO is eagerly awaited, and that’s not mentioning Pandora itself, whose stock has doubled in price this year.

What will Pandora do with the cash it raises? The standard “general corporate purposes” line was rolled out in the sale announcement, although the company also said it “may use a portion of the net proceeds for potential acquisitions of businesses, products or technologies.”